The Medium Is the Menace: AI and the Platforming of Hate Speech
The essays collected in this series (link to the Introduction) trace how nonhuman listening operates through sound, speech, and platformed media across distinct but interconnected domains. Across these accounts, listening no longer secures meaning or relation; it becomes a site of contestation, where sound is mobilized, processed, and weaponized within systems that privilege circulation, recognition, and response over truth. Last week, Olga Zaitseva-Herz examines how nonhuman listening operates under conditions of war, where AI-generated voices and deepfakes destabilize the very grounds of auditory trust. Through the case of Ukraine, she shows how platforms and political actors alike exploit algorithmic listening systems to amplify affect, circulate disinformation, and transform voice into a tool of psychological warfare. Listening, in this context, becomes not a means of understanding but a terrain of uncertainty. Today, Houman Mehrabian turns to the dynamics of speech on social media, arguing that platforms do not simply fail to regulate hate but structurally amplify it through forms of proximity that render identity itself as a site of perceived threat. –Guest Editor Kathryn Huether
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During the Cold War, when the world was divided into two geopolitical poles, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was drafted to enshrine individual rights. Article 19 guarantees freedom of expression through any medium, “regardless of frontiers.” The media landscape has significantly changed since then—we have transitioned from an information system where newspapers, radio, and television were dominant communication technologies to one where digital and online media play a central role, especially in transcending national frontiers. The Internet has amplified the right to free speech dramatically. Take, for instance, the decentralized hacktivist collective Anonymous, gliding undetected past gatekeeping mechanisms to route confidential information to the public gaze or to rally digital protests, only to disappear again into the shadows of cyberspace. Yet, Article 19 also insists that this freedom carries “special duties and responsibilities”: expression may be restricted when necessary to protect or prevent harm. The Internet, however, has challenged the enforcement of such laws in unprecedented ways.
What has changed is not only how speech circulates, but how it is heard—now increasingly by automated systems that register patterns rather than consider context. As Kathryn Huether explains in the introduction of this series, this shift marks the emergence of a new form of “nonhuman listening”: a mode of perception in which speech is registered as data, classified and acted upon without ever being encountered as expression. Take, for instance, practices such as trolling, doxing, and flaming. Cyberbullies discover ever-new ways to propagate harmful content without raising the alarm bells of automated systems. Tamar Mitts explains how the digital ecosystem creates “safe havens” for online extremism: extremist groups persist by migrating to more permissive platforms, mobilizing aggrieved users to strengthen their group identity, or reformulating their messaging to slip past automated detection. As major platforms dial back their governance measures, those who disseminate toxic content grow ever more “resilient.”
Digital technologies have opened new pathways for bad actors to take advantage of the protections of free speech. While this helps explain the growing volume of hate speech online, it addresses only the surface, the content itself. Even with robust content moderation tools in place, the deeper problem lies in the design of these platforms. Their very structure enables polarized expression and, its most pernicious manifestation, hate speech—precisely what Article 19 and related human rights frameworks seek to prevent. This severely hinders meaningful dialogue in the increasingly interconnected and interdependent world that these technologies have created.
In the global social media economy, the United States sets the dominant tone. Its major platforms—Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, alongside Google’s YouTube, and others such as X, Pinterest, and Snapchat—shape what is circulated and amplified across the world. These companies operate under the protections of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which places relatively few restrictions on hate speech. By contrast, many other nations impose far stricter limits on online expression—from laws regulating hate speech in countries such as Germany and France to the extensive censorship regimes of states like China and Russia. Yet the question of free expression in the digital age exceeds the legal framework of any single nation, no matter how powerful the prohibition or permission. More fundamentally, the medium of digital communication itself has transformed what speech is, and how it functions.
The era of private thinking and personal reasoning has given way to that of instant, public sharing, and everything shared on networking platforms is processed through algorithms running on binary coding. Algorithms should not be regarded simply as nonhuman—as alien intrusions into daily life—but rather as a sophisticated extension of a mode of human thinking that reduces complexity and nuance to mutually exclusive opposites. At the most basic level, these systems translate speech, images, and interaction into discrete units of data—encoded as sequences of zeroes and ones—and sort them through processes to classify. In doing so, they do not “listen” and interpret meaning in a human sense; they detect patterns and correlations across vast datasets. In this sense, nonhuman algorithms proliferate the dichotomy of “us” versus “them.” They entrench what Keith Stanovich calls “myside thinking”—a widespread inclination to interpret the world through the lens of prior beliefs and loyalties. Appearing in every stage of thinking, across disciplines, and in all demographic groups, “myside bias,” Stanovich argues, is more powerful than other types of bias because it involves “emotional commitment and ego preoccupation.” Its greatest danger is that it prevents communities from converging on shared facts, even when evidence is available.
Algorithmic systems amplify thought attuned to binaries and, in turn, cultivate speech that gravitates toward extremes. Opposition intensifies into antagonism, nuance dissolves into simplicity, and complexity flattens into stark contrasts. To grasp this dynamic, it is essential to examine the underlying mechanisms of nonhuman listening that nudge speech in this direction. An illuminating lens is offered by Judith Butler, whose account of “implicit” or “unspoken” modes of speech regulation reveal how discourse is shaped even before explicit prohibitions limit it. These are conditions of intelligibility, frameworks that determine—in advance—what registers as meaningful speech, what recedes as noise, and what is never heard at all.
Online, discussion is always up and running. Breaking the silence or ending the conversation is almost unheard of in the digital realm. Ironically, this feature of Internet-mediated communication can itself function as speech control. It recalls what Michel Foucault describes as endless “commentary,” in which discourse continually folds back on itself, repeating and reworking what has already been said. Silence becomes nearly impossible. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, the user becomes “undulating,” continuously “surfing” across interconnected spaces, each interaction rippling outward across the network. Repetition is vital for platforms that reward virality. Content creators, for instance, are encouraged to “repurpose” their old ideas and, in turn, encourage their audience to “co-create” their already-recycled ideas. In this sense, nothing truly begins or ends.
Algorithms are not designed to propel free movement; recommendation systems learn from simple behavioral cues—a like or a skip, a pause or a quick swipe away—to incentivize us to go with the flow of hyper-personalized data and to affiliate with echo chambers of like-minded users. Even generative AI replies to each prompt in light of the ones that came before, becoming increasingly “sycophantic.” This explains why a growing number of people, especially younger individuals, are turning to artificial intelligence for friendship. These technologies offer something that mimics attentive listening, a feeling that the user’s words do not go unheard. Artificial intelligence devices such as the Friend necklace are designed to make this type of connection effortless and always within reach.
Under these conditions, free speech comes to mean access to flows of information—the ability to move with them, rather than to analyze, interrupt, or challenge them. Listening becomes adaptive and reactive, attuned less to sound argumentation than to speedy circulation. Within insulated echo chambers, expressions are encountered not as opinions to be evaluated but as signals to be affirmed or rejected. Memes, emojis, and abbreviated forms of expression condense complicated positions into immediate affective cues, eliciting responses of pride, indignation, gloating, mockery, delight, disappointment, disdain. The list goes on. What circulates most readily is not sustained reasoning but intensified feeling, shared across networks of both human and nonhuman participants.
This is not to say that debate has no place in the digital world. On the contrary, platform environments are configured to reduce nearly every issue (controversial or not) into a rigidly polarized dispute. Algorithmic systems, optimized for engagement, sort content into recognizable positions, amplifying contrast and conflict. Issues are framed less as open questions than as preconfigured disputes, with sides already drawn and reiterated across countless iterations. One is either “woke” or dead set against it. Greta Thunberg’s activism is either inspiring or self-promoting. Online, users need only choose a side and signal agreement through simple actions—a like, a repost, a heart, an angry face. Digital debate becomes echoed: each side recycles familiar arguments that reinforce group identity rather than persuade others. This resembles the house war of the Montagues and the Capulets, with no hope of reconciliation.
Even truth is drawn into this binary logic, as its validity now lies in how closely it aligns with one’s viewpoint. Platforms like Truth Social—the social media site launched by Trump in 2022 and described as “free from political discrimination”—reinforce this dynamic by presenting “truth” as something to be claimed by one side, with opposing views dismissed as fake news.
The same pattern appears in responses to deepfakes. Also in 2022, a manipulated video of President Volodymyr Zelensky falsely urging Ukrainian troops to surrender circulated online. While widely debunked, its reception still followed partisan lines: dismissed as propaganda for some, and treated by others as plausible or strategically meaningful within existing narratives. Olga Zaitseva-Herz discusses other examples of AI-generated voices and videos used as psychological weapon in warfare. More broadly, deepfakes are often framed as satire or humor when they support one’s perspective, and condemned as disinformation when they do not. Despite the apparent complexity of digital media, this dynamic reduces debate to a series of rigid oppositions. Under these conditions, dialogue becomes difficult to sustain—or even non-existent—as positions are evaluated less through exchange than through alignment.
Dialogue is often proposed as the answer to hate speech. The United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech describes it as “any kind of communication in speech, writing or behavior, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are.” This definition does not fully capture the underlying dynamic. While hate speech targets the identity of others, it is often driven by the perception that those identities pose a threat to one’s own. Research on hate suggests that this perception is not tied to a single action but to a broader attribution of the other as inherently dangerous or malicious. Hate, in this sense, does not respond to behavior; it calcifies identity itself as a source of threat. Hate thus becomes, as Daniele Battista puts it, an ideal “communicative asset” for driving the digital economy.
Hate speech is the violent defense of an insecure self; it is Iago, ever sensitive to the closeness of the dissimilar other; it is yet another extreme manifestation of the us-versus-them mindset. But we should not confine our understanding of online hate speech to the level of content. The amplification of harmful communication is not merely due to mobilization of verbal violence by political figures or technical failures of content moderation systems—such as hate speech slipping through as free speech—but is more fundamentally a formal effect of the platforms themselves. Collapsing geographic and cultural distances, the Internet brings diverse users into unprecedented forms of closeness. This structure reflects what Marshall McLuhan diagnoses as the “implosive” character of modern media, in which boundaries contract and differences are forced into constant contact. Under these conditions, both users and automated systems are overwhelmed with volume, and listening—human and nonhuman alike—becomes reactive rather than responsive. The patient work of contextual understanding disappears beneath the flood of signals.
By their very design, these shared virtual spaces place the user’s sense of self under continuous pressure. In response, users align with particular influencers and subscribe to particular channels to “strengthen feelings of belonging and opposition.” Speech, then, tends to take on a defensive quality, reinforcing identity against perceived threat. Digital platforms do not simply host hate speech; they develop the very conditions in which it emerges. Prolonged interaction and sustained proximity in polarized environments make communication more likely to be shaped by anxiety than by dialogue. What follows is not a failure of communication, but a transformation of it: speech no longer seeks to understand the other, but to secure the self.
Returning to the framework of this series, we can understand the shift to digital mediation as one in which listening collapses into the reiterative reception of preconstituted positions and oppositions, precipitating immediate, affectively saturated reactions that merely reproduce them. Increasingly “detached from sensation, exposure, and accountability,” listening operates less as an encounter with speech than as a mechanism of bias confirmation by selectively sorting information.
Amid digital closeness in environments marked by binary thinking, the more users are “silenced by speech,” the more listening becomes passive. We need to distance ourselves from communication as an instrument of pacification, or worse, suppression. Dialogue begins with attentive listening—not only to the speech of others, but also for polarizing mechanisms that surround us both online and offline. More importantly, we need to appreciate the formal effects of a listening that is not reduced to a rehearsal for rebuttal, a listening that is an antidote to the restless compulsion to react to speech that our digital devices incessantly fuel. In suspending the immediacy of response, listening evolves into a delaying tactic, a deliberate deferral that carves out an interval within which patient reflection may find form.
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Featured Image by Flickr User Jeff Gates, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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Houman Mehrabian earned his doctorate in English from the University of Waterloo (2020), where he focused on the history and theory of rhetoric. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Arts, Communications & Social Sciences department at University Canada West. His research interests include exploring the rhetorical and technological mechanisms that regulate speech. Bringing together perspectives from critical media studies, philosophy, and rhetorical theory, his work investigates how the structural design of digital platforms and their economic logics can amplify harmful discourse, and how appeals to more free speech in online environments can operate as rhetorical cover for the proliferation and normalization of hate speech. Through this lens, his research aims to better understand the interplay between technology, power, and communication in the digital age.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Hate & Non-Human Listening, an Introduction–Kathryn Huether
Mimicked Voices and Nonhuman Listening: AI Deepfakes, Speech, and Sonic Manipulation in the Digital War on Ukraine—Olga Zaitseva-Herz
Impaulsive: Bro-casting Trump, Part I–Andrew J. Salvati
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A Feast of Silence: Listening as Stoic Practice
In honor of International Podcast Day on 30 September, Sounding Out! brings you Pod-Tember (and Pod-Tober too, actually, now that we’re bi-weekly) a series of posts exploring different facets of the audio art of the podcast, which we have been putting into those earbuds since 2011. Enjoy! –JS
Zeno of Citium, the Hellenistic philosopher who founded the Stoic school at the turn of the third century BCE, once had this advice to give to a garrulous young man: “the reason why we have two ears and only one mouth is so that we might listen more and talk less.” The more we speak, Zeno was saying, the more self-absorbed and foolish we become; in learning to listen, we temper our own egos and attune ourselves to the truths of the world around us.
This piece of wisdom from a 2,300-year-old philosophy was a part of the marketer and best-selling author Ryan Holiday’s reflection on stillness and silence on the October 4 edition of his Daily Stoic podcast, a daily affirmational that brings listeners “a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics illustrated with stories from history, current events, and literature to help you be better at what you do.” In citing Zeno, Holiday’s point was that while our highly mediated culture often rewards loudness, extroversion, and “hot takes,” we might do better to listen, and learn from others, rather than simply talk over them.
Over the past decade, Stoicism, which teaches that self-discipline, moderation, and emotional equanimity are key to overcoming hardship and living a good life, has had something of a revival as a self-help paradigm – and Holiday has been one of its most energetic evangelists. Articles in Vice, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, the Guardian, Forbes, Wired, and Sports Illustrated have all taken note of his influence among Silicon Valley tech workers, corporate executives, professional athletes, military personnel, and celebrities to whom he markets the philosophy as a “life-hack”; his six best-selling books on the subject, meanwhile, have positioned him as perhaps the most commercially successful author in a mushrooming genre of Stoic literature; and The Daily Stoic’s A-level guest list, which has included Malcom Gladwell, Camilla Cabello, Matthew McConaughey, and Charlamagne Tha God, has established Stoicism’s cultural cachet as a practical guide for living, and positioned Holiday as its authoritative interpreter.
Among the lessons Holiday draws from Stoicism, the practice of stillness (as his 2019 book puts it) is key: a way of quieting the mind, of “hear[ing] only what needs to be heard,” and really listening to the truth of the world in order to achieve the kind of tranquility (what the Greeks called apatheia) that will help us “think well, work well, and be well.”
With this emphasis on stillness, silence, and listening, it would seem quite appropriate that Holiday would turn to the aural medium of podcasting to proclaim the ancient wisdoms of Zeno, Cleanthes, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, for the Stoics, listening was a foundational skill through which one cultivated the habits of discipline, self-control, and self-reflection that are the heart of the Stoic way of life (askesis); for it is in quieting ourselves and listening that we begin to open ourselves to the teachings of the masters and think about their application in our own lives.
And Holiday is hardly the only Stoic podcaster. As I write this, a simple search on Stitcher yields over 30 podcasts with “Stoicism” in their titles or descriptions, many of which have been updated in the past month (December, 2021), including the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci’s Stoic Meditations, Stoicism Discovery, Stoicism on Fire, The Sunday Stoic, The Stoic Handbook, The Walled Garden, Stoic Coffee Break, and Stoic Solutions.
Elsewhere, Stoicism has been promoted by self-improvement podcasters like the tech investor and lifestyle guru Tim Ferriss,and retired Navy SEAL and leadership coach Jocko Willink; and – perhaps unsurprisingly, given that the ancient Stoics were white men who emphasized values like rationality and self-mastery, which are typically coded as male – it has been advocated as a tactic for modern living by masculinity podcasters like Brett McKay and Ryan Michler.
Navigating this space can often feel like a small world (or, perhaps a promotional circuit): Holiday has been a guest on The Tim Ferriss Show, The Art of Manliness, and Order of Man, and has hosted Willink, McKay, and Ferriss on The Daily Stoic.
A full exploration of this network is outside my scope here. For now, I will consider the ways in which podcasting is particularly well-suited to Stoic askesis; and specifically, how the very act of listening – on our commutes, on long drives, at the gym, on hikes, and in moments of quiet meditation – constitutes what Michel Foucault (who himself drew upon Stoic texts in his later work on ethics) called a technology of the self: those techniques, “which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.”
Part of a larger project investigating the historical emergence of discourses of sex and sexuality in Western culture, Foucault in his later writings and lectures turned his attention away from the normative and disciplinary systems of subjectivation that had previously concerned him, and toward the study of ethical modalities by which individuals actively fashioned their own subjectivity. Focusing particularly on the ethical practices of the ancient world, he discovered a more autonomous framework for individual conduct, one that centered on self-imposed standards and daily habits rather than a prescribed moral code.
This precept of the “care of the self” (epimeleia heatou), Foucault maintained, could be traced from Alcibiades to the Imperial period, and had impelled individual Greeks and Romans (the free white men, at least) to embark upon their own stylized projects of self-transformation.
Among the practices that interested Foucault – and indeed, the one he understood to be essential to the “subjectivation of true discourse” – was the act of listening. In the first hour of his March 3, 1982 lecture at the Collège de France (published in English in The Hermeneutics of the Subject), for example, Foucault explained that listening is
the first move in as[k]esis … since listening, in a culture which you know was fundamentally oral, is what enables us to take in the logos, to take in what is said that is true. However, if conducted properly, listening also makes it possible for the individual to be convinced of the truth spoken to him, of the truth he encounters in the logos. And, finally, listening is the first moment of the process by which the truth which has been heard, listened to, and properly taken in, sinks into the subject so to speak, becomes embedded in him and begins to become suus (to become his own) and thus forms the matrix for ethos (p. 332).
This emphasis on listening, Foucault noted, is evident as far back as the Pythagoreans, who required initiates to spend five years in silence so as to be able to learn the community’s exercises, practices, and philosophical precepts. The themes of silence and listening were further developed in the culture dominated by Stoicism, Foucault noted, and emerged as a “new pedagogical game” that contrasted with the earlier dialogic model. Now, the master spoke, and the student listened.
But the nature of audition could be somewhat ambiguous for the ancients, Foucault explained, in that it was a passive (pathetikos) activity, yet it is the primary sense through which we receive the logos, the rational substance that the Stoics believed to govern the universe. In his treatise On Listening, for instance, Plutarch (46 CE – c. 116CE) wrote that it was imperative for young men cultivate the art of listening because they must learn to listen to the logos throughout adulthood, and so must learn to distinguish truth from the artifices of flattery or rhetoric. One must listen to the words of the master attentively, so that the logos might penetrate the soul. “The man who has the habit of listening with restraint and respect,” Plutarch wrote, “takes in and masters a useful discourse, and more readily sees through and detects a useless or false one, showing himself thus to be a lover of truth and not a lover of disputation” (On Listening, IV).
Perhaps the most striking of the texts Foucault discussed, however (see The Hermeneutics of the Subject, pp. 343-344), is Philo of Alexandria’s (20 BCE – c. 50 CE) description of the practices of the Therapeutae, a closed community of ascetics who renounced their earthly possessions in order to pursue “perfect happiness,” and the salvation of their soul (De Vita Contemplativa, §12). In his text, Philo takes specific note of the group’s elaborate banquet rituals, during which an elder comes to the fore and gives a discourse on philosophical doctrine or on sacred scripture (“teaching very slowly, lingering and emphasizing with repetitions, engraving the thoughts on the souls” [§76]). During these talks, the audience remained silent and motionless, adopting a precisely prescribed posture intended to fix their attention on the speaker, so that the discourse “does not stay on the tips of the ears, but comes through the hearing to the soul and there remains securely (§31).” In these feasts of silence, mastery of the body is the foundation of the care of the soul.
Though modern Stoic podcasting does not demand nearly this level of physical discipline of its listeners, we are nevertheless encouraged to incorporate podcasting into a daily ritual of silence and reflection – a new, digital feast of silence. As we listen through our headphones, in our cars, or in some other quiet personal space, we are joined in intimate connection with our hosts, who guide us in our contemplation of timeless Stoic wisdoms, engraving these thoughts in our minds so that we might have them ready at hand in order, as Holiday often says, to make them the principle of our actions.
It is this possibility of principled living that is perhaps at the heart of Stoicism’s twenty-first century appeal. As Elizabeth J. Peterson has written, in our age of seemingly perpetual crisis, Stoicism’s resurgence is undoubtedly due to its reputation as a practical guide for surviving difficult times. “Between President Trump, Brexit, the Middle East and the domestic issues in virtually every country,” she writes, “it’s not difficult to see why many people, across the world, need a source of clarity, calm, and fortitude.” (And that was before the pandemic, which occasioned a spate of articles explaining how Stoicism might help us endure a moment of profound uncertainty).
But the headlines aren’t the only source of our anxieties; we have plenty of it in our own lives. At a time of deepening economic precarity, in which we are routinely urged to become self-reliant, self-enterprising subjects in order to maximize our value in the marketplace, Stoicism offers a ready-made coping mechanism with a pedigree of centuries: at once a framework for cultivating emotional resilience, and a self-help paradigm for transforming ourselves into more disciplined, effective, and successful individuals.
When co-opted by late capitalist culture, when marketed as a “life-hack” and configured as an ethics of personal success, then, Stoic principles quite easily align with neoliberal imperatives that we endlessly labor on ourselves in order to better compete in an agonistic struggle for personal fulfillment and economic security. From this perspective, even the advice that we embrace stillness becomes a way of momentarily refreshing ourselves, only to return to work to “persevere” and “succeed.”
One of the most trenchant critiques of Stoicism is that by advising us not to concern ourselves with that which we cannot control (see Epictetus, The Discourses, 2.5.4-5), it is fundamentally a philosophy for living in the world as it exists, and not for challenging it (indeed, Stoicism’s popularity among the Roman elite indicates something of its congeniality with the established order). And while, as Sara Ahmed has written, “neoliberalism sweeps up too much when all forms of self-care become symptoms of neoliberalism,” it is nevertheless worth considering how an ostensibly self-directed ascetic practice is complicit in more hegemonic (neoliberal, patriarchal, and misogynistic) templates of subjectivity.
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Featured Image: “Marcus Aurelius Headphone Stand!” by JM3is3D @Etsy. Image used for purposes of critique.
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Andrew J. Salvati is an adjunct professor in the Media and Communications program at Drew University, where he teaches courses on podcasting and television studies. His research interests include media and cultural memory, television history, and mediated masculinity. He is the co-founder and occasional co-host of Inside the Box: The TV History Podcast, and Drew Archives in 10.
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‘No Place Like Home’: Dissonance and Displacement in Gimlet Media’s Fiction Podcast “Homecoming”–-Miranda Wilson
SO! Podcast #78: Ethical Storytelling in Podcasting–Laura Garbes, Alex Hanesworth, Babette Thomas, Jennifer Lynn Stoever
SO! Podcast #79: Behind the Podcast: deconstructing scenes from AFRI0550, African American Health Activism – Nic John Ramos and Laura Garbes
Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love–Shakira Holt
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